Archive for December 15th, 2005

That’s former Bill Clinton political guru Dick Morris… getting star billing on the state of Connecticut’s Top 100 Delinquent Taxpayer Accounts. According to the Nutmeg State’s official Web site, Morris is the eighth-biggest scofflaw, owing $259,154.41 in income taxes as of Nov. 1. Morris didn’t respond by deadline to Lowdown’s request for an explanation.

It’s so refreshing to see a Republican actively taking part in the War On Taxes instead of just sitting on his ass and letting the government fight his battles for him.

This is a rather disturbing/depressing story. This Manhattan woman’s cat, Oliver, escaped, was turned over to a shelter, and promptly adopted by someone else, who refuses to give him back. And according to a rather vague 1894 statute, “a pet owner’s right to reclaim a lost pet is terminated if the animal is not claimed within 48 hours of being seized by an authorized city agency.” So now she has to battle it out in court to get her beloved kitty back. I can’t even imagine how much that would suck.

My thoughts:

o Oliver’s new owner is a jerk. Yes, she has a legal claim to keep the cat, but for all intents and purposes she has stolen or kidnapped him, and her argument is basically, “Hey, you shouldn’t have let him escape – once he gets out, he’s fair game.” But even if the new owner has indeed bonded with him, Oliver’s previous owner should have a stronger claim, unless she was abusive or negligent. Also, consider how cats (and pets in general) are like family for a lot of people. Imagine if your child wandered off one day, the stranger who found him decided to keep him or her, and then argued that you lost the kid because you’re a lousy parent.

UPDATE: The NY Daily News covered this story as well, and notes that the first owner had Oliver for four years, while the new owner had him for ONE WEEK before deciding to keep him. I’m going to amend my intial assessment from “jerk” to “completely fucking selfish and evil.”

o Didn’t Oliver have a nametag with his owner’s contact information? If so, why didn’t the shelter or the person who found him attempt to contact his owner? If he didn’t (it doesn’t look like he has one in the photo accompanying the article), why the hell not??? I wouldn’t go so far as to say she deserves to lose her cat because she didn’t give him a nametag, but she was certainly tempting fate. If I’m the new owner or her lawyer, I would make that front and center in any claims of negligence (the new owner is claiming negligence, but she appears to be using the escape itself as her evidentiary trump card).

o If you have cats or dogs, give them nametags. Hell, give them those tracer chip implants if you can. And if it doesn’t exist already, there should be some kind of central lost-pet registry where all the shelters log brief descriptions of any animals they receive, as well as when and where they were found. So if you lose your pet, you can just check the registry rather than going from shelter to shelter. Somehow, I suspect that this will never happen…

After months of resistance, the White House has agreed to accept Sen. John McCain’s call for a law specifically banning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of foreign suspects in the war on terror, several congressional officials said Thursday.

(snip)

These officials also cautioned the agreement was encountering opposition in the House from Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

The White House at one point threatened a veto if the ban was included in legislation sent to his desk, and Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to all Republican senators to give an exemption to the CIA.

But congressional sentiment was overwhelmingly in favor of the ban, and McCain, who was held and tortured for five years in Vietnam, adopted the issue.

He and the administration have been negotiating for weeks in search of a compromise, but it became increasingly clear that he, not the administration, had the votes in Congress.

Yet another Profiles In Courage moment for BushCo. Too bad it looks like there are still some Congressional Republicans who just can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet torture. Or “coercive interrogation”, or whateve the hell the euphemism of choice is these days. I’m just going to continue calling it what they’d call it if someone did it to their kids.

From today’s NYT article about the uncertainty (to put it mildly) about whether Iraq will be able to follow Bush’s roadmap to a successful, independent, relatively occupation-free government:

Participants in some of the briefings he has received in the Situation Room in recent weeks say that acknowledgment is in keeping with the far more somber tone of the briefings. Military commanders have described possible situations that range from the best case – drawing American troops down to about 100,000 before the American elections in November – to keeping them at far higher numbers if the new Parliament turns to chaos, civil war threatens, or political leaders are assassinated.

Wow. So, basically, the “best case” in Iraq is one that helps the Republicans get votes in 2006. Interesting criteria for military decision-making.